ROCKLAND, ME.- The Farnsworth Art Museum presents the exhibit Celebrating Louise Nevelson: An American Master. After a four-year absence while traveling to art museums in other states, the museum’s Nevelson collection will be reinstalled to include nearly forty paintings, etchings, sculptures and assemblages, spanning her career from the late 1920s thru the mid-1980s. The reinstallation is supported in part by the Maine Arts Commission.

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson (born Leah Berliawsky, September 23, 1900, Kiev, Ukraine; died April 17, 1988, New York) was a U.S. (Ukrainan-born) sculptor.

Nevelson is known for her abstract expressionist “boxes” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her “assemblages” or assemblies, one of which was three stories high. Says Nevelson, ”When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."

Born of a Jewish timber merchant in the Ukraine, in 1899, Leah (as she was originally known) migrated to the United States around 1904 due to her father's business taking her to Rockland, Maine. Reports suggest the young girl played with timber almost from the time she arrived in Maine, and set her sights on becoming a sculptor by age ten, creating some sculptures from wooden scraps.

She only began studying art seriously, however, when in 1920 she married Charles Nevelson, a wealthy ship owner, and enrolled at the Arts Students League to study painting, voice and dance. She had one child, Myron (later renamed Mike), but because Charles was opposed to her studying arts, she separated from him in 1931 (though formal divorce did not occur until 1941). With Hans Hofmann, Nevelson studied in Munich until the Nazis took over in 1933, after which she exhibited small-scale works for the first time.

In 1937 she worked with renowned Mexican painter and political activist Diego Rivera on the Rockfeller murals, and during this period she worked in teaching with the New Deal's WPA. During the 1940s she showed five major exhibitions exhibiting the influences of surrealism and collage. The Circus, the Clown Is The Center Of The World (1943) was the major exhibit of this period. She was prodigiously productive during the next fifteen years, as she evolved the sophisticated collage made of wood scraps (some meters high!) that became her speciality. Her 1958 show, Moon Garden + One, in which walls of wood collages surrounded the viewer in darkened rooms. This showed her as the pioneer American environmental artist and gave her a prominence she had never achieved before.

During the following two decades, Nevelson, aided by a forceful public personality and a flamboyant style of clothing, exhibited widely throughout the major art centers of the world and received many public commissions. To commemorate her work, the Louise Nevelson Plaza, an entire outdoor garden of her wood and metal collages, was established in Lower Manhattan during 1979.

Louise Nevelson died in her home in 1988, but has retained her reputation as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century since. She has been commemorated on a number of postage stamps since her death. Her legacy, of course, is unique and as such it cannot be duplicated. However, artistic genius seems to run in the Nevelson genes. Her son Mike Nevelson has become a successful sculptor. Similarly, one of his daughters, Neith Nevelson, born from his first marriage to Susan Nevelson, has become a legend with her art as well.